Poetry / Kristy Bowen
:: from extinction event ::
It’s summer, and it’s always a party. Bring only what you can carry in your tiny shell. In this tiny hell you call daylight. Bell sleeves and body glitter. Your best teeth to bite the hand that feeds you. We mistook it for a picnic, so we made potato salad that rotted in the sun. One gala apple after another we shot off each other’s heads. After all, the fossils weren’t remains, not really, but the mass that took up the space where we were. Filled the holes we left behind. Nothing but hair and bone, when we were once so pretty. Tidily packing for an afternoon in the ammunition fields, wielding our baskets over hills. Killing the birds with rocks and filling our pockets with shells. Look at the way our bodies glint under the ozone glow. The footprints that vanish before dawn. The clearing we claimed as ours swallowing us whole until nothing was left but a spoon, a broken plate. The inevitable party after the party died out, our sequins scattered in the dirt.
:: from extinction event ::
Eventually we need a place to house the bones. Room after room stuffed with the dead. In the basement we stack them on shelves and tuck them into drawers. Ours, the best kind of chloroform, the sleep you descend into like a staircase. A swift twist of the neck. We almost believed you were dead, except for the slow growl of a pulse. The way your eyes flicker when we drag a comb through the matted fur. How you mewl and hiss through the slats after everyone goes home. Morning, playing possum at the bottom of your glass cage. The busted latch fastened from the inside. We almost believed you wanted out.
:: from extinction event ::
In this box, I collect the broken things. The twisted oak, the dusty lynx. Budgies and buntings and speckled hawks tumbled from their nests. We are going on a picnic and can take only the most unfortunate. The deer missing its antler, the one-eyed frog. Like Noah, we build and build, but the space gets smaller. Nothing can breathe, least of all me. My lungs stopped up with feathers and the small animals I’ve smuggled inside the body for safe keeping. In the box, we rustle the feathers and bend the bones, but nothing fits. Even side by side, stacked vertically in rows. Nothing sits upright or thrives. We name them, tag their tiny feet, and still, nothing moves inside the box. All night we soothe them with sounds their mothers make, but still they sleep and dream of trees.
From the writer
:: Account ::
extinction event is a series of pieces written in preparation for a reading at the Field Museum of Natural History in the fall of 2019. While I was granted full access to the collections and had vague ideas going in to write about dinosaur fossils, I never set out to write something so apocalyptic (I already have an entire book dedicated to the apocalypse), but it happened nevertheless, this time not through a lens of nuclear warfare or zombie plagues but via climate change and the alarmingly frequent extinction event markers laid out through evolutionary exhibits. I also spent a good chunk of my visits in the Hall of Birds, then reading about evolutionary links between dinosaurs and their nearest surviving ancestors, as well as doing research on early museum diorama artists like Carl Akeley. The series increasingly became about the idea of museums themselves as documents of lost worlds and the struggle to document what one day may be our own.
A writer and book artist, Kristy Bowen is the author of sex & violence (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and several other collections, chapbooks, artist books, and zines. She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio.